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- Convenor:
-
Ben Campbell
(Durham University)
Send message to Convenor
- Track:
- Producing the Earth
- Location:
- University Place 3.210
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 7 August, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel addresses oil as central to current, interrelated economic and ecological crises. We propose formulating theoretical approaches for an anthropology of oil to stimulate research into what is unknown and needs to be known to address the current reproduction of disorder caused by big oil.
Long Abstract:
Oil is observed to cause disorder (as well as order) wherever it is produced. It raises hopes for revenues that better livelihoods of the poor, but fails to deliver what is expected of it. Instead, immense gains resulting from oil extraction go to big investors: state governments, national oil companies and the major oil multi-nationals. Thus, a particular conjuncture provides the rationale for this panel. First, it is a moment of Great Recession, when globally there is economic tribulation, especially in advanced centers of capitalism in the West. Second, it is a moment when both Global Warming and Peak Oil are being, or are about to be, experienced; both of which promise extreme economic and ecological distress. On a theoretical level, we observe a regrounding in materiality, as for example in the materiality of resources. Oil, and other petroleum products, are central to current, interrelated crises. Oil is the sine qua non of capitalist enterprise. Analysis of oil within an anthropological context, exemplified by the recent volume, Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil (2011), has begun to flourish. Given that an anthropology of oil has been proposed as a distinct subfield of a broader anthropology of resources, it is high time to organize a gathering to review what is known anthropologically about oil and to formulate theoretical approaches both to account for existing knowledge, and to stimulate research into what is unknown and needs to be known to address tribulations of the current conjuncture.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 7 August, 2013, -Eleanor Allegra Lucie Beevor (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
Uganda’s nascent oil sector has the makings for political disaster already, on top of which the theory of “Oil’s Curse” has entered public narrative, and is affecting the way people understand, and act on, their situation. This work examines the relationship between population and state in the oil producing region of Hoima.
Paper long abstract:
An increasingly distrusted president, with the increased incentive of promised oil wealth to retain power, is bound to affect the process of politics. So Ugandan journalists, political commentators and ordinary people are already remarking, with a striking frequency of references to "Oil's Curse". What, in the wake of the boom-bust period of the 1970s and 1980s was a retrospective political-economic observation appears to have entered the consciousness of a population, and is affecting their lived experience and interpretation of a developing oil industry.
The above is a set of pre-fieldwork observations that I will be pursuing for my Masters of Research dissertation (with fieldwork in the spring of 2013). The purpose is to examine the changing relationship between people and the Ugandan state in the oil producing region of Hoima, using qualitative and quantitative methods to document peoples' experience and subsequent political decision making. A semiotic perspective, as in Spencer (2007), will be employed. The existence of the state is enforced by interaction with its symbols, agents and discourse, which will inevitably be subject to change in this context. This is quantitatively reflected in the political actions that follow.
This area of study would offer a valuable insight into the panel's discussion, in that it examines not just how political trouble is produced (the symptoms of which fall under the adage of Oil's Curse), but how the notion of the "Curse" itself has entered public consciousness and is affecting peoples' impression of the state apparatus and their politicians.
Nathalie Ortar (ENTPE-University of Lyon)
Paper short abstract:
For an interdisciplinary research lead in France about scenarios of energy transition, low middle classes families living in suburban areas were interviewed: some already owned a house while others were in the process of becoming home-owner. In this paper we will discuss the everyday "bricolage" in order to keep the bill down, the role of public policies and the immovibility of cars.
Paper long abstract:
For an interdisciplinary research lead in France about scenarios of energy transition, low middle classes families living in suburban areas near Lyon in France, were interviewed: some already owned a house while other were in the process of becoming home-owner. The aim was for the first type of population to observe how people dealt with energy transition while they were already settled and seemed to have little choice as too where they could work and where they could move in a context prices housing prices getting down in suburban areas but still rising downtown, why for the people in the process of becoming home-owner, we wanted to observe which kind of choice where made related to energy and what people where ready to give up if they couldn't buy the type of good they were looking for because of housing prices.
In this paper we will discuss the everyday "bricolage" in order to keep energy bills down when oil prices are rising, the role of public policies and the immovability of cars, whose use is hardly discussed.
Javier Taks (Universidad de la República - Uruguay)
Paper short abstract:
Consensus to transit from a highly oil dependent society to a more sovereign energy matrix in Uruguay hides emergent environmental and territorial conflicts regarding the goals of energy production and use. This paper shows how energy is alienated from lay understandings, real settings and social power in the name of a “First world” national horizon.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is about what anthropology as a critical discipline might contribute to the current energy transition from fossil to post-fossil civilization. It focuses, firstly, on the concepts of energy expressed by those who research, teach and manage energy systems in Uruguay. I argue that there is a modernist division between machine-oriented energy and individual human-oriented "free" energy; and both of them do confront a perceptual and conceptual form of energy as movement and action, embedded in daily activities, that works as a baseline in the appropriation of energy resources. The paper follows by describing environmental conflicts, resulting from state policies towards a more diversified energy matrix aimed to give response to a steady increase in energy demand, and simultaneously to escape from oil dependency. It depicts conflicts in the building of new territories of renewable energies (wind-mills, biomass plants and bio-fuels plantations) and potential conflicts in re-making fossil fuels territories (off-shore oil exploration, natural gas terminals, and coal mining). The discussion does not avoid the dilemmas faced by the nation-state between a natural resources export-oriented development model and local claim for environmental protection and social equity, which seems to be an expression of a deeper interested groups and class struggle.
The paper concludes by suggesting that anthropologists must complement energy consumption studies (mostly at household level) with a focus on energy production systems to reveal the relation between energy and social power hidden by techno-economic arguments in the midst of a great transformation.